اِحْفَظِ اللهَ يَحْفَظْكَ

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Al Fattah

Have you noticed how, you can only recognize how certain things happened the way they did only if you look back at your life. It’s impossible to connect the dots looking forward, but profoundly moving to reflect on how each decision, each interaction, each step we’ve taken up till this very second, is all connected. Incredible.

Since the last time I posted, I’ve graduated from school, my cousin got married, my parents are doing well alhumdulillah, my sisters are doing great with school and life in general, I know what raf‘ nasb and jarr mean, I started working and got promoted to a supervisor role .. so many changes. So many openings.

Thinking of Allah’s name Al Fattah – The Opener. Life wouldn’t be complete if we never experienced darkness, challenges, struggles, and hardship. One of the fundamental experiences of life is to go through the darkness so we can experience the true beauty and mercy of light. When Allah (seemingly) closes a door or makes something (seemingly) difficult, we run to Him and we remember Him (swa) sitting, standing, lying down, and make constant mention of Allah, and Allah subhanahu wata’ala reminds us of this many times over in the Qur’an. When that same door, or a different source of blessings is opened for us, those nights worth of prayers, the incessant du’as, the regular adhkar and charity .. to what level does it continue? So even in something that is an apparent opening, such as a new job, relationship, a big exciting change in life that seems positive, we must take steps to reflect and acknowledge if it’s truly an opening in the sense that it is opening more ways for us to get closer to Allah subhanahu wata’ala, or if it’s somehow distancing us from that which is most important.

May Allah subhanahu wata’ala, out of His infinite mercy and wisdom forgive us of our shortcommings, and make every opening, an opening towards what He subhanahu wata’ala pleases, ameen.

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5 thoughts on “Al Fattah”

I really needed this right now. The way everything is all connected in our past and present is incredibly relevant; there are so many things that we are often deprived of due to our mistakes and so many things that we are granted through Allah’s Mercy. I never had the chance to reflect on Allah’s Name, Al-Fattah due to lack of context. Thank you for opening the door to insight for me :)

I wish I was more consistent, writing in this space has been a big part of my personal development for the past 4-5 years, and I immediately notice what a lack of reflection does to my iman.. InshaAllah hope to be more consistent. May Allah grant us istiqamah.

It might help to set yourself deadlines or targets. That is one of the reasons why it’s easier to do things in a group: because then you would be accountable to other people, and might have deadlines to meet. So simply impose that mindset on yourself on things that you do on your own as well. For example, when I started this blog I would just blog whenever I felt like it and usually there would be a couple of posts per month. But after a while it became more difficult to keep at it, and there was a time when a whole month went by without anything being posted. I then remembered that hadith mentioned above about the importance of istiqamah, so I decided to set myself the target of writing two posts per month. And alhamdulillah, ever since then I’ve been able to achieve that, even though it doesn’t always turn out the way I want it to be.